All of the advice here is excellent. Since I am a lone wolf pilot and don't operate with wing friends, I've learned patience.

Here is a tactic that I use with larger ships in any CZ such as Vettes, Clippers, Anacondas, Pythons, Chiefs and Challengers. You have to have a fast(er) ship.
Speed is life.

Tap your target a few times to get his attention. He'll eventually zero in on you and follow. Cull him from the herd. You may have to turn and engage once or twice just to keep him after you. Once he's well away from his flock turn and get him by the throat.

Another thing I learned when flying small ships was to have a quick scan around before you pick a side. Check the contacts panel, particularly for any big ships like condas, vettes or cutters. See what side they're on. If they're on the side you're about to join, shoot over there and then choose your faction - then fly escort for them. They'll last longer with a player escorting them, and they'll tend to pull more aggro than you do so you won't have to worry about getting ganged up on. With any luck, you'll soon get a nice little ball of green pips steamrolling around the place that you can just follow around.

As Xintar said, split the hostiles away from their allies so you can kill them. By the same token, try to ensure you don't get separated from your allies. If chasing down that eagle means leaving the relative safety of your deathball and flying into a pack of reds, just leave them. They'll be back.

Translation - go in a small, inconspicuous ship. (Courier is awesome for that. So are both Eagles, Viper or Diamondback Scout) Find a big blob of allied ships and attack what they're attacking. If you get focused, stop shooting and withdraw for a moment. Try to kill-steal as much as possible.
Quick ship is a plus as you can move between the focal points of the battle quickly.

Don't go there with a Corvette or Anaconda. You'll deal too much damage, get focused down and murdered. (Well, at least until you get better)

This works.
Don't choose a side in the middle of the fur ball.
Pull off to one side and then join.
Use the "select hostile" keys to avoid confusion.
(To be fair you can still commit friendly fire, so just be careful.)

Once you figure out the "flow" of a CZ, it's not just chaos, there is a pattern, you can use a powerfully built med/lrg ship and just kill everything, spawn after spawn.
I end up chasing everyone down in my Vette and FGS, and waiting for new enemies.

If you are 'strategically retreating' be careful about going from the 'lawless' zone that is the CZ bubble back to space thats governed by a faction. If you go (I think) 30Km away you'll get a 'LEAVING CZ!' type message. If you do, and you have ships following you do not fire on them as it will be classed as assault.

All of the advice here is excellent. Since I am a lone wolf pilot and don't operate with wing friends, I've learned patience.

Here is a tactic that I use with larger ships in any CZ such as Vettes, Clippers, Anacondas, Pythons, Chiefs and Challengers. You have to have a fast(er) ship.
Speed is life.

Tap your target a few times to get his attention. He'll eventually zero in on you and follow. Cull him from the herd. You may have to turn and engage once or twice just to keep him after you. Once he's well away from his flock turn and get him by the throat.

To add:
I'm currently working on a YouTube video for this subject.
I don't know when I have the time to finish it (I'm roughly halfway through), so for now I'll just paste the raw script for some of what I have written.

DISCLAIMER: I took out the more incomplete sections, which are very fragmented since I move stuff around during the scripting.
Certain sections below are also meant to have visual explanations attached to them.
Even this script may change once I collect enough video footage.

LET’S ENTER THE CONFLICT ZONE
When entering a conflict zone, the most common advice is to fly away from the waypoint before picking a side. There are three important reasons for that advice:

• 1 - NPCs will spawn in waves. So you might find yourself jumping in, see some ships spawn, then you select a side and start shooting at something…and suddenly 10 more ships jump in.
This can be bad for you, due to reason number 2.
• 2 - Whenever an NPC spawns, it will DIRECTLY attack whatever target is closest to them. That means if enemy 3 ships spawn right next to you, they will turn around and chase you.
It is important to know that ships with turrets can still attack you INDIRECTLY — which means they are not actively chasing you wherever you go. I’ll get deeper into this in the next segment.
• 3 - As a rule of thumb, once an NPC has chosen a target, they will not switch target until their current target dies, or until something else starts shooting them. So don’t draw the attention of an enemy, unless you want to start fighting it.

Note that NPCs will only start attacking, AFTER you have chosen a side to fight for. So if you want to play it extra safe at the beginning - move away from the waypoint, and wait a little bit while keeping an eye out for the different waves jumping in, before selecting a side.

NEXT UP IS SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
This is probably the single most important skill to learn, if you want to master conflict zones.
At any given time, you must be aware of the following;
• What is your shield and hull percentage?
• Is anyone attacking you?
• How many are attacking you?
• Are there more enemies or allied ships on radar?
• In what direction are your allies?
Now that might sound like a lot, but all of this information is available at a quick glance at the area around the radar — you don’t even need to click on any buttons.

There is one more thing to add to that list, but this requires one or more button presses.
• If anyone IS attacking, you need to find out, as quickly as possible, whether they are attacking you directly or indirectly, and most importantly what ship is it.
To find out you need to use either the “select highest threat” OR the “cycle next enemy” key binding.
In an optimal scenario “select highest threat” will highlight the target that is currently shooting at you.
It doesn’t always work though, and it certainly won’t work if you’re dealing with more than one attacker — so a lot of the time, you’re better off just cycling through all the enemies until you highlight the one blinking on the radar.

Once you highlight the attacker, and if you know how to use the radar and the hologram properly — you can instantly tell WHERE the enemy is in relation to you, what ship he’s flying, what combat rank he has and most importantly you can tell whether or not he is turning to face you.
Remember what I said earlier about being attacked INDIRECTLY? If the ship is not facing you, or not in the process of turning to face you — that means it is not actively chasing you, and you are simply being hit by a turret that is randomly firing at nearby targets. If that is the case, you can ignore that target if you’re already in a fight with something else.

Once you get better, you can regulate when you need to do this check, based on the context of the situation. For example: If my shields are almost full and I’m almost finished destroying a ship, when suddenly a second or third ship starts attacking me from behind, I’ll often ignore them until I have destroyed the first one. This is especially the case in a heavily engineered ship.
Again, context is important — if I suddenly lose 1/3 of my shields in a few seconds, that’s a sign that I don’t have the time to finish off the first target and I need to get out of there immediately. Not in 5 seconds time, not in 2 seconds, but RIGHT NOW.

NEXT UP, YOUR ALLIES: THESE ARE YOUR BIGGEST ASSETS
Conflict Zones are not for lone wolves. Especially if you’re in smaller ships, or ships with little to engineer upgrades.
So unless you are screwing around, your goal should be to build up an allied fleet of death — you can do this by following and helping the largest group of allied ships to take out enemies.
The more allied ships you can get into a group, the faster you will be able to destroy enemies, which is very useful if you’re in a ship with relatively little firepower to begin with.
Furthermore this allied group can passively help you out, if you get into trouble — which brings us to the next part.

I never liked CZ but the above is a good and detail guide I follow. I participate in CZ activities when there are free decals on offer or to unlock an engineer and as bonus they are good for farming Hybrid Capacitors and Grid Resistors

I agree with @Chris Simon not to fly any of the big 3 ships in CZs unless in a wing. I find SLFs in solo is also futile b/c they are easily overwhelmed unless you like listening to your NPC crew member cries for help.

You can totally fly the big three in a CZ solo, you just have to be mega careful.
It's very easy to be the last ship standing and have all the recently arrived enemy ships target you and only you. Suddenly you have 10 ships firing all at once and you need to get out of there.

Failing that you can use the strategy of rescuing smaller allied ships from bigger enemies to "stockpile" a collection of allied ships for the enemies to shoot at instead of you.

You're doing something wrong if you're dying in a CZ while flying a Vulture.

Unless it depends on your combat rating, I've only lost one Vulture in a CZ and that's because I got greedy before jumping out.
I am almost never gang attacked unless I go chasing after a runaway and get separated from the herd. I've even gathered MAT's in the middle of combat in the Vulture and am almost always ignored.

Some people say cull the large ships from the herd (and that works), but if you are in it for credits, then stay with the green and attack the ships they attack. You may see a couple 3 on 1 fights or a single 12 on 1 fight.
Just pick a pack and go with them.

For the large ships, just hit them every few seconds, don't unload on them because they call for reinforcements as well as direct all their fire on you as you've become their biggest threat.
If you do unload, just fly evasive until the firepower from allies get their attention. BTW, it can be fun shooting the Conda's and watching them go back and forth trying to decide who they are going to target.

Lastly, keep an eye on your shields. It takes a while to get 3km away from ships chasing you, especially the small fighters that usually carry rails and never miss.
Some ships will fire up to 4km away from you. I think you need to be around 7km away from large ships to charge up properly for a low wake.

If being attacked by multiple ships, boost toward and through the "field of green" allied fighters. They may be in combat, but some fighters will break away to engage the bogies on your tail.
When boosting away in the Vulture I do 3 pips to system, 3 pips to engines. If my shields are down it's 4 pips to engines, 2 pips to system. And I boost, boost, boost.

Really? I never struggled with them overly, though that being said, it can be pretty easy to be swamped with little ships, though flying one yourself can circumvent this easy enough due to the increased movement speed, though if you go in without a shiled expect to be smapped with missiles like nobodys buisiness. Again that can be dealt with in silent running.

The biggest struggle in them IMO is he capital ships when thy drop in, you need big guns and good aim to deal with them effectively, you can do it in a viper or cobra, but its hard AF.